Knowing Without Proof

There’s a moment. Often quiet, often inconvenient…when you realize you already know something you can’t yet justify.

You don’t have evidence.
You don’t have language.
You don’t have a framework that makes it acceptable.

You just know.

Most of us are trained to distrust that moment.

We’re taught that knowing requires validation; data, lineage, authority, proof. Anything that doesn’t arrive through an approved channel is treated as suspect, premature, or naive. Over time, we learn to override what we sense in favor of what can be explained.

But that wasn’t always the way knowledge worked.

For most of human history, understanding was embodied. It was relational. It was passed through observation, repetition, story, practice. Wisdom lived in the hands, the voice, the kitchen, the land. It didn’t need to announce itself as “special” to be trusted; it was simply useful, reliable, and known.

Much of that way of knowing has been dismissed, fragmented, or deliberately erased; not because it failed, but because it resisted control. Knowledge that lived in bodies, relationships, and lived practice could not be standardized, audited, or stripped of context. What replaced it was a narrower definition of intelligence: one that rewards explanation over recognition, authority over experience, and certainty over resonance.

The Harbinger was written from outside that narrow frame.

The story doesn’t rush to explain itself. It allows meaning to surface through pattern rather than instruction; through repetition, atmosphere, and echo. Certain elements carry weight before their significance is made explicit. Connections are sensed before they are clarified.

That isn’t a narrative trick. It’s an invitation.

An invitation to read the way people once learned: by paying attention. By noticing what repeats. By trusting recognition before analysis. By allowing understanding to arrive in its own time.

Readers who tell me the book stayed with them rarely talk about solving it. They talk about feeling something settle. About recognizing something familiar they couldn’t immediately place. About knowing, before knowing why.

That response matters to me.

Because intuition isn’t a mystical add-on. It’s a form of literacy we were taught to abandon. And stories, especially the old ones, or the ones that behave like old ones, still know how to speak to it.

Not to convince.
Not to prove.
But to remember.